Don't Stress, It's Just a Few Basic School Supplies
As if the end of summer blues that come along with Labor Day weren’t enough, we’re simultaneously launched into the chaotic ritual of hunting and gathering school supplies for the start of the new school year.
And for those of us who started school prior to Labor Day, we have the benefit of the long weekend on our side to take our time getting school supplies together which, just like the timeline for summer reading on the last day of school, seems like an eternity.
At least one might think.
Yet here we are at 6:30 pm on Labor Day, my wife and I clamoring to find things like scientific calculators and pro-tractors. And by the way, nothing diminishes my child’s confidence in me as a parent or the value of my liberal arts college degree quite like the moment he tells me he needs a protractor for math and I respond with, “That’s one of those plastic, half-circle things, right?”
And what once seemed like an easy task of simply telling the PTO, “Yes, our son is entering 8th grade, please place our order for the ‘8th Grade School Supplies’ package” and writing out a check has ultimately left us swimming in a sea of three-hole punched paper, an assortment of various-sized three-ring binders, pocket folders, folder dividers, pens, pencils, dry-erase markers (black, red, and blue), college-ruled notebooks - none of that manuscript-ruled shit - and I’m not even sure what some of this other stuff is.
The pile of supplies you see here? It’s been amassed over the past decade, purchased out of fear that if we didn’t have the correct 2” three-ring-binder by the fourth day of school, one point would be deducted from our child’s initial grade due to not passing the basic test of having his shit together. Which I’m actually convinced is really just a test to see which parents have their shit together.
Back when I was a kid (yes, I’m going there) there seemed to be little need for such an array of school supplies. In fact, I think I even made excuses for why I needed more supplies than what teachers were requiring.
“Mom, I need two pocket-folders. I think this Red Sox one and that Patriots one will work.” Ooh, what’s this? Run-DMC folders? “Did I say I only needed two folders? I actually meant three. And that trapper-keeper looks pretty sharp too...”
But at this stage in life, there is no room in our house for “wants” when it comes to school supplies. We are doubling down and sticking to “needs”, even if that means the unthinkable - possibly being unprepared for class without the proper school supplies. GASP!
You need a 3-subject notebook? Great, let’s take this one from last year, rip out the first ten pages from each of the three subject sections, which is all you used in 180 days of school in this notebook, and a well-placed “Beachcomber” sticker turns last year’s English Lit notebook into this year's World History notebook.
We comb the list, class by class, making use of and recycling, reclaiming, and reusing as much as possible, measuring the thickness of each stray binder to see if it meets the instructor's thickness guideline. My son has so much anxiety about this process that he’s convinced having a 1.5” binder for a class calling for a 1” binder will result in points deducted from his final GPA.
Included on the list of supplies for one class are 10 glue sticks and four erasers. Who the fuck is teaching this course, MacGyver? Do we need a set of ball bearings as well? It’s possible I missed it on the syllabus but apparently, if the school building starts to fall apart, it’s the responsibility of the 8th-grade math class to glue it back together. I’m assuming they’ll wear the erasers on their heads to protect them from falling bricks should this occur.
And believe it or not, we manage to find 10 glue sticks with varying degrees of glue still left in each of them after scouring through our desk drawer in the den, the junk drawer in the kitchen, and underneath the buffet in the dining room. Like I said, we’ve been procuring school supplies for 10 years.
Their condition is questionable, “Dad, this one looks dried out.”
“Try spitting on it. Maybe pop it in the microwave for a few.”
Though we really don’t have time for glue stick testing. So we take the glue sticks and place them into a pencil box whose best days ended back in 2016. But it’s been resting in an Adidas backpack, buried in the closet since then, so we bring it out for a curtain call. And we pack the sticks in the box with the four pink erasers, one of which I hold up, and in an effort to put my ignorance about protractors and other mathematical instruments behind me, I proudly announce to my son, “This is a trapezoid,” only to be corrected and told that it is actually a “parallelogram”.
But none of that matters because, like hiding a joint in a pack of Camel Lights in an effort to sneak it into a Pink Floyd concert without getting caught, I just hope they don’t open the pencil box for a closer look at its contents, revealing half empty and partially dried glue sticks.
After foraging through the leftover and unused school supplies from the last ten years, we eventually give in to the fact that we must make our pilgrimage to the local office supply store for the not-so-joyous experience of running into people from town that we kind of, sort of know, but not well enough that the chance meeting won’t unavoidably end up with an uncomfortable pause and some awkward small talk conversation in between the Papermate pens display and large stack of composition notebooks - which are now available in every color imaginable these days.
And it will get worse because once I’m out of that awkward moment, I will run into them again in the next aisle near the folders, and again in the next aisle at the notebooks, and I’ll ultimately end up next to them in the checkout line which is longer than any line this merchant has experienced in the past 11 months and at that particular moment, will feel like The. Longest. Line. Ever.
So I act super-focused as if finding that seven-pocket accordion folder is the absolute, most important thing in my life right now. So much so that I can’t afford to look anywhere but straight ahead or make eye contact with anyone around me.
And it seems like we almost find what we need, but it’s never exactly quite right, “I need pocket folders. No, they need to have holes punched in them. No, I need green, yellow, and red, not blue. No, these won’t work, they don’t have tabs, the teacher said they had to have tabs.”
Did the teacher even bother to confirm if any office supply manufacturer in the world makes reinforced-three-hole-punched-quarter-inch-tri-pocket-notebook-folders with a velcro latch and magnifying glass attachment in yellow before adding it to the class supply list?
With moments to spare before the store closes, our scavenger hunt for school supplies is complete. Next year will be different, I tell myself. Like summer reading, we won’t let it come down to the wire.
And once we’ve finally gathered and organized all of the school supplies and agreed to give the kids rides to school in the morning because the amount of provisions accumulated doesn’t come anywhere near to fitting into their backpacks, I breathe a sigh of relief before hearing the dreaded words of my next least favorite back to school activity...
“Ok, now I have these papers that need to be filled out and signed and they’re all due back tomorrow….”
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